


through the teeth of this tempest

by friendly_ficus



Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: Angst, Gen, Mild Gore, Post-Episode 69, so uh. sorry about that., there's something metaphysical happening here but i'm not a philosopher, this isn't how magic works but i Don't Care
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-01
Updated: 2019-07-01
Packaged: 2020-05-31 15:09:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,247
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19428517
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/friendly_ficus/pseuds/friendly_ficus
Summary: The geas on Yasha holds for thirty days.(Or: Reconstructing the self.)





	through the teeth of this tempest

**Author's Note:**

> major spoilers for episode 69. angst relating to yasha’s body not being in her control.

_ First Day _

Yasha’s body rages and grins along with the Laughing Hand, pounds a fist against the door. There is nothing in her now but furious devotion to an old dead friend.

(The Mighty Nein are a ruin outside the ancient, now unquiet grave. They go back to the barracks, shaken.)

Obann's blood hums in her hands and her body moves on its own, helping this terrible child that she knows cannot be stopped. Yasha is afraid. She disappears inside herself, turns away from the window into the world and seeks answers within.

There is a jagged landscape of corpses and dead grass in sandy soil. Jutting up from the ground are outcroppings of gray rock and the sky above is an empty, uncaring blue. She does not look at the faces.

In the wasteland her soul, she picks up one flat stone and sets it atop another.

\---

_ Second Day _

Yasha’s body makes it to the final door. The feet move her past the celestial statues. The Laughing Hand approves of the assistance. Obann’s heartbeat echoes in the grip of her fingers and Yasha’s hands remember him.

Within, fear makes Yasha shake. She hears the seven-note song and even though she does not return to looking outside, she knows that it is the end of the prison. There is nothing left to be done.

The wastes stretch as far as she can see, strewn with rock and bodies and things she does not wish to contemplate. Yasha lifts another stone.

(Beau wakes from a dream and walks the worn paths of Bazzoxan. A few times, the citizens of Xhorhas start to approach her but the hard line of her jaw and the cold stillness in her eyes ward them away.)

The land is gray and the sky is empty but the weight of the stone is reassuring in her hands. She adds it to the growing pile.

Yasha’s body continues to walk.

\---

_ Third Day _

Time passes. Yasha’s body travels with the monster she has loosed. The lands of Xhorhas stretch out before them and her hand points in the direction of one of the Angel’s haunts. 

Yasha screams and draws a greatsword from her back and swings, wild and desperate to hurt the Laughing Hand. 

Her mouth does not move. Her arms do not respond. She does not even control when she can blink. Obann’s heartbeat continues to echo in her blood. She turns away from the world again, shaken.

(Nott runs a hand through her hair, catching a withered flower between her fingers. She holds very still for a moment, then lets it fall gently to the ground. Caleb and Beau continue to try and figure out what the next steps are.)

Within, she hauls another stone to the heap. It scrapes her hands as she sets it atop the others. The sting is almost impossible to notice.

On each of these rocks, she has bled.

\---

_ Fifth Day _

There is no reason to continue this labor, but the only other options Yasha has are watching like a passenger in her own skin or dealing with the corpses that litter this mental landscape. Neither is appealing. At least adding to the low hill of rocks is some kind of creation. 

She does not open her book for Zuala. She does not risk her body taking notice of it. There are no flowers to be found in whatever place she’s in. There is nothing but the scrub and the bodies and the shards of rock and the empty sky above.

(Within the dome on the way back to Rosohna, Fjord says something a step too far and Beau throws herself at him, fist-first. They tussle in the dirt and it takes Jester pulling them apart for the fight to stop.

_ “Enough,”  _ she shouts, thaumaturgy frightening a cloud of birds from the trees. “We don’t  _ do  _ this.”)

Somewhere in the north of Xhorhas, Yasha’s feet continue their journey. In her hands, Obann begins to coalesce into something that can walk the world again.

\---

_ Ninth Day _

Time is losing meaning for Yasha. There is no sun moving across the strange inner sky and very little light in the world outside. She does not have Caleb to tell her when to sleep and she does not feel any weariness beyond a satisfying soreness in her arms, so she does not rest. There is no sense of hunger or thirst. Perhaps her body eats. Perhaps her body tires. Yasha does not look to see it.

(In the fine house in the capital city, Jester stares at the mural she’s painted on the wall. The wildflowers blur before her eyes. She’s so sad and so angry, feels sick with it, and when the mattress dips beside her she curls against the green-cloaked shoulder and cries.

The Traveler hums and pets her hair like he did when she was a child and a bird stopped visiting her windowsill. This is worse than an innocent heartbreak. This is worse than anything she’s felt since Molly - maybe since ever. 

“Can you help her,” Jester says, once the shaking stops. “Can you help Yasha?”

“I’m afraid she isn’t mine to help.”)

A breeze brushes the back of Yasha’s neck but she does not look away from her task. There is only this, only the stacking of stones in a rising pile, only the construction of something she does not yet recognize. 

But in the bright, sunless sky: a single wisp of vapor.

\---

_ Thirteenth Day _

Yasha’s body walks on. The Laughing Hand is never silent, is amused by the rage and the fear and the force behind her swords. The constant laughing would drive Yasha mad, if she acknowledged her ears. Her body hunts. Her eyes watch the horizon. Obann’s presence drapes across the line of her shoulders. The base of the skull that should be hers is ever-burning.

(Caduceus dreams of the Kiln, of the salt dunes and the crystalline waters. The Wildmother does not send him images of Yasha, but he supposes that’s alright. All things move down their own ordained path.

He sees Jester glaring at the sky, bitter at the Stormlord and furious with herself. He watches Beau pace the edges of the dome each night, violence coiled in her form. He knows that Caleb worries about betrayal, that they’ve betrayed Yasha and that it will fracture the group entirely. Caduceus does not worry. He continues to smile. All things happen in their own time.

He shares the observations with Fjord, on watch. The warlock laughs but it twists in the air.

“You smile when you’re afraid, Deuce. You saying you aren’t scared now?”)

Internally, Yasha strains as she drags the largest piece yet to the base of her great, strangely-structured monument. It scrapes with a satisfying sound as it fills in the base of a precarious spot. She is still unsure what she is doing, but it feels like progress. 

In the silence comes a sound so faint she might be imagining it: the faraway crashing of thunder. Above, the wispy clouds are gathering, moving slow but sure across the blue. 

Yasha does not know what will happen - there are no more stones in her immediate vicinity, and she will have to cross corpses to gather more. So she will. She will do whatever she has to.

\---

_ Seventeenth Day _

Yasha’s body remembers how to kill. They come upon a village of nonbelievers and Obann, present enough to whisper, urges her hands to action. Yasha’s arms swing Yasha’s sword and it bites into the flesh of strangers.

Within, the first cry of an innocent in pain echoes. She does not look up. She does not look out. She is a coward, a coward, a coward and she does not watch. But she sets down the current stone and she - and she - 

Inside, Yasha turns over the first corpse.

(Caleb does not dream of Yasha’s face, but he thinks of her often. He wonders if there is a trap like that in him, to pull him from the Nein and back to a life he’d rather not think about. He wonders what the war will become, without them there to urge the Bright Queen toward peace. And he wonders if the Kiln will hold the answers Caduceus thinks it does.

Behind him on the moorbounder, Nott feels the nerves that make him tense. Frumpkin’s sudden, loud purring is another indication. Nott dreams of a lot of things, wonders still if she is right to continue travelling while her husband and son live their lives in Nicodranas, wonders if she will return to them or die on another quest that brings the group less than nothing.)

Yasha’s hands rip and tear, her mouth stretches in a grin, her footsteps match the rhythm of Obann’s words. There will be no mercy for the heathens in this group of farms. 

The first corpse (In her mind? Her soul? She remains uncertain.) is someone Yasha doesn’t even recognize, but she - it’s not right for someone to just... rot in here with her. The soil under her feet is dry, loose enough. She begins digging graves. 

There is time, under her darkening sky. There is time to bury her dead.

Her body leaves a fire burning with no one alive to put it out.

\---

_ Nineteenth Day _

Obann grouses as the creature of mouths and teeth leaves them, turns in the direction of the great battlefields of the Calamity seeking a father that will not be found. He slips down from Yasha’s shoulders and touches the ground, solidifying into something like his previous shape. His eyes are warm and his voice comforting in Yasha’s ears.

(Nott watches Fjord watch the others sleep. They’re moving ever-northward, seeking the Kiln at the urging of Caduceus. 

“Yasha didn’t want to betray us,” she says, because it’s not like there’s anything better to do. Might as well address the barlgura in the room.

“I  _ know,” _ Fjord says, in the tone of a man who has had Jester sit him down for a serious talking-to and had Beau address him, first mate to captain, and Caduceus make abstract statements at.

“I was scared of her sometimes too,” Nott offers. “Yasha could be scary. But she was one of us.”

“She’s still one of us. We’ll get her back, Nott. I’m not sure how the hell we’re gonna do it, but we will.”)

It’s been some amount of time. It’s been enough time for her to dig many graves. The land within is more understandable, less littered with chaos and blood. The clouds above are meeting each other, crashing almost silently and rolling into something more substantial. The blue sky is slowly being overtaken.

Behind Obann and Yasha’s body, on the outside, the talisman of the Stormlord glints with white-blue energy where it hangs from one sword. Unnoticed, or at least unacknowledged by Obann, there is the faintest smell of ozone.

\---

_ Twenty-third Day _

The body continues to walk. Yasha’s ears hear Obann as he describes what their friends have been doing, who they’ve recruited into the Angel’s service. He spins a narrative for a face that smiles back at him, but it is not her. If Yasha was ever his to control, body and brain and mind and soul, if she were ever his friend entirely - she no longer is.

It is not her out there, because Yasha is inside, back to moving rock.

(Beau burns the message Dairon’s gotten to her, written in Avantika’s code. The information is sensitive, is objectives her mentor wants her to achieve and people she’s meant to spy on in the Krynn Dynasty. Beau has not managed to explain that she’s left Xhorhas seeking the holy site of a goddess she does not follow. In fact, it’s still unclear if she’s considered a traitor to the Cobalt Soul for the whole “heroes-of-the-dynasty” thing. 

There are too many questions right now, when all she wants to do is tear across the continent searching for Yasha, finding Yasha, and saving Yasha. In that order.

The priorities right now are completely fucked. Caduceus wants to do this thing he’s already dreaming of and devoted to, Fjord just wants to avoid the sea and Uk’otoa, Caleb’s thinking himself in circles and Nott doesn’t know how to drag him out of them, and Jester’s just... angry, in a way that Beau respects but is also unsettled by.

Tonight, not sleeping, Beau considers how the group would break, the factions they might shatter into. But she gets up, and takes her watch, and reminds herself that these are her friends. These are her friends, and they’re going to get Yasha back. There’s a member of the Mighty Nein that can be saved.)

There’s no sweat, like there’s no hunger and no weariness in this strange place for Yasha. So it’s strange, when she realizes her hair is damp. It’s new, when she looks up from her land of graves and stone to see that it has begun to rain.

\---

_ Twenty-sixth Day _

Obann jokes across the fire and Yasha’s head nods along and her throat laughs and the corners of her eyes crinkle. The heat at the back of her skull burns on. 

Whoever that person is out there, she has no business being Yasha. Yasha is in the process of moving the last stone across a great plain, through the mud and the steadily falling rain. 

(Jester draws pictures of the dunes of salt and the mountain without snow, serious pictures alongside the ones for the Traveler. Well, technically they’re  _ all  _ for the Traveler, but these are more to capture the moments.

When Yasha returns, Jester’s going to show her everything. And Nott’s been pressing flowers, too, and Beau’s writing more and more in her journal, notes about where they’ve been and who they’ve met and, and, and.

Yasha will come home to them, or they will go and steal her back, and she will hear all sorts of new stories.)

Yasha adds the last fragment to the base. Yasha builds a mountain in her mind.

\---

_ Twenty-ninth Day _

Yasha’s eyes open and she follows where Obann leads, skirting the edges of cities as the promise of their old cohort continues to fall from his mouth. Yasha’s ears continue to listen.

(Caleb shaves, the routine soothing, and recalls the caution in Yasha’s eyes all that time ago, kneeling over him with sword in hand. He remembers her quiet happiness when he declared them friends.

Caduceus thinks they’re very close to the Kiln, halfway up the snowless mountain as they are. Caleb isn’t sure what they’re going to find there, but after... he wants to stop the war. A good person would want to stop the war, and coincidentally he does too. 

“This means we are friends,” he had said, terrified, trying to maneuver into a relationship that meant Yasha would protect him more.

His hand shakes a little, just enough to nick his jaw.) 

The rain is larger now and falling in sheets, the wind howling all around her. Above, the sky boils and cracks with lightning. The mountain is the tallest thing as far as she can see, and the top is struck by electricity again and again.

Yasha climbs until her hands are bleeding. She climbs until her shoulders ache, until her back burns, until the strain is almost too much to bear. She climbs with such focus that she forgets - forgets that her body moves with a will not her own, forgets the smoking ruins of the village twelve days past, forgets the beating of Obann’s heart in her head.

Yasha built a mountain and at the summit there is an altar that she knows well. It’s the same one she woke up at, or something that looks very like it, some mirroring of the memory. She has found herself kneeling at it once before, with years wiped clean from her mind.

This time, she knows, feels in her gut, that she will need something to serve as an offering.

\---

_ Thirtieth Day _

Obann sits across another campsite from her body and smiles at a joke her voice has made. When he speaks, it is a river of fire and it burns her head. Her body cares not for this, tosses back a smile and an answering quip. Her body lays a few feet from him to sleep and he sleeps too, content with the fact that they are finally coming back under the Angel’s wings.

There is a storm and there is an altar and Yasha breathes heavily as lightning strikes not two feet away from her. She needs a sacrifice.

(The heat of the Kiln is overwhelming, and Caduceus reels as his goddess grants him holy knowledge. The Wildmother shapes him, her Clay, and fires him, and makes him someone new in her name.

It is wonderful and glorious and not one bit of it concerns Yasha. This dream has never been about Yasha, of course, but he had hoped... he had hoped for  _ something, _ certainly.

Caduceus is not disappointed. He isn’t. He will return and save his home and purify her great trees and his prayers do not taste like failure in his mouth, not even a little bit.)

Yasha is afraid. The storm is all around her and she remembers that she is in chains, and with the recollection there they are on her wrists. The metal is cold and heavy, a mirror to the burning at her skull. She has spent so long turned away from her own body, her own wrists and hands and arms and legs and ankles and feet, her own wings - 

But she needs a sacrifice, and she lets herself settle back into skin just enough to really feel the heat in her head, the pattern of Obann’s words and heartbeat rattling through her bones, the comfort he must’ve been, the friend he must’ve made for her. Once, she would have died for him. Of that much, she is sure.

Returning to the altar at the top of the mountain, with the rain pouring and the sky alight with lightning and her wrists weighed down with iron, there is something warm and slick in her hands. It beats,  _ thud- _ thud,  _ thud- _ thud, and where the raindrops touch it steams. It smells of sulfur and smoke.

With one hand, she presses the heart to the altar. With the other she reaches back for a sword, but the chain pulls taut and she can’t, she  _ can’t -  _

Yasha thinks of Obann, of how he seemed to be a friend and how instead he has controlled her, and the rage makes her cold. And she thinks of Jester and Nott and Beau and Fjord and Caleb and Caduceus and, and Molly, all her friends left in the world, no matter the promises Obann makes. 

She thinks of a landscape of dry grass and corpses and coagulating blood puddled between stones, wonders if that is who she is, if that is who she has to be. She stands before the altar on the mountain she has raised and keeps the organ pinned and strains, muscles burning, feels bruises blooming on her wrists but continues to  _ pull -  _

A weak link snaps, the sound echoing in the latest crash of thunder.

Yasha raises a greatsword with one hand and it catches a bolt of lightning, energy crackling across the blade. And she drives it through the heart.

\---

_ Thirty-first Day. _

Yasha opens her own eyes.

**Author's Note:**

> we have no idea what’s gonna happen next and i don’t think this is how it’s gonna shake out but i’m coping. yasha fights for control in her own mind or something i don’t really know okay this is a coping mechanism. this is some kind of overly symbolic fic but if you boil it down, i am sad and i want yasha to be okay and i believe that someday she will be. will it be within a month? No but i want it to be. i was gonna do thirty-one days but a lot of them were just like “they walked around. the m9 were sad. it was emotional” so sorry if that disappoints. dark night of my soul damn i’m crying again, title is a Sting lyric sorry this fic is incoherent i’m having Big Feelings about this


End file.
